By Sally Jane Black
Cases before the Supreme Court are threatening to roll back gains won by the LGBT liberation struggle. With the decision to send the Texas case Turner v. Pidgeon back to the lower courts, the Supreme Court has opened the gate for businesses to refuse to pay for insurance and other benefits for same-sex partners, and with Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission currently pending, soon businesses might be allowed to legally discriminate against same-sex couples on the basis of “religious freedom.” What was won through decades of struggle, culminating in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, is now being overturned in pieces.
The fact that the right to marry is being ignored by these laws in favor of revoking the more tangible economic benefits that came with it is telling: the objections being made to same-sex marriage are rooted in greed, not a desire to protect anyone’s freedoms. These cases are blatant attacks on workers. As has been seen before, companies will take every opportunity to push back against workers’ gains. If the courts allow them to deny same-sex couples the same benefits as heterosexual couples, it’s only a matter of time before this is attempted to be used as precedent to make those same benefits inaccessible to heterosexual couples. If a loophole can be found, it will be taken advantage of. The goal is not to protect the freedoms of the religious—who mostly support same-sex marriage in this country—but the owners and bosses who want to squeeze every last penny out of their workers.
What these threats show is how easily concessions won from the ruling class can be lost. Unless the working class stands up to the ruling class and fights in unison against the divisive, manipulative attempts to economically punish queer and trans people, real change will never happen.
In December, the Louisiana courts declared that the state could not extend legal protections to queer and trans state workers as another step in a continuing fight between the governor and the state’s attorney general Jeff Landry, who has used trans people as nothing more than a political victim. Previously, the Democrats had offered to remove trans people from these protections in exchange for keeping them for queer people. This is a repetition of the same failed tactics that have been used for decades, from the fight for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act at the federal level to the recent “bathroom bills” which have been used to rile supporters and divide the opposition.